Style Prompt

In the first part of this post, I covered how to use colors that are within your color palette and how they help harmonize your features into an outfit. In this next part, I want to explain some pieces that can help accentuate your face but still balance the attention to your outfit as well.

For this next part, I want to talk about this look that Fergie wore to the 10th Annual Spring Fling Party in New York City (image via California Style):

Without doing a color analysis for Fergie, I think the colors she’s wearing work well with her palette. The picture overall is generally poor due to the flash, spontaneity, angle, etc. but that is not what I want to talk about. While I believe she tackled the color issue that Tilda Swinton faced in part 1, there is nothing bringing your eyes up to her face to help frame it due to the light colored jacket and light gray top. Her face isn’t necessarily being washed out, it’s just that there is no color around her face when compared to the rest of the high intensity colors she’s uses through the bottom half of the outfit.

How do we solve this? How about a more interesting necklace than the one she’s currently wearing (Image via Citizen Couture):

Here we have an extremely simple dress that is topped off with a great eye grabbing necklace that, due to the gold links and blonde hair, frames Joanna Hillman’s face perfectly. The benefits of using colors in her palette around her face can also be seen by how much attention the lipstick draws. In Fergie’s look, her issue of getting color around the face was complicated due to the styling of the motorcycle jacket, a style I’ve disliked from the beginning. I think Fergie was on the right track with the long necklace but I would recommend a gem with more color (amethyst perhaps?) along with a chain that was slightly shorter to get more attention upwards.

Coming back to Joanna Hillman’s look, the only thing I would change is to put her in a shoe that incorporates one of the colors from her necklace or face. Considering how plain the bottom of the look is, the rest of the outfit almost seems uninteresting. To show how to pull this off perfectly, I have to point back to an image of Giovanna Battaglia that I wrote about earlier.

Rather than a necklace, Giovanna uses a dark scarf accenting her dark features like her hair, eyes, and eyebrows. She then equalizes the attention between her face and her outfit by adding black heels which then bracket the white Valentino dress. Giovanna has an very good sense of how to style outfits, something you can observe here.

So whether you use a scarf, jewelry, or a blouse of a color from your color palette, the key to bringing the most beauty to your face is to frame it accordingly.